


This is how an angel dies

by Kayndred



Series: Some Nights [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Being in Schock, Clinical Hyper-Professional Touching, Community: hc_bingo, F/F, F/M, Gen, Hospital-like Setting, Invasion of personal space, Jail Cell-like Setting, M/M, Manhandling by Unfriendlies, Multi, One Prompt Per Fill, One Prompt Per Fill: Blackout Attempt, Other, Prompt: Loss of Possessions, Screwing with Science and Drugs, Uncomfortable feelings of being touched in a clinical manner while nude, hc_bingo Round Three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-03
Updated: 2012-09-03
Packaged: 2017-11-13 11:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kayndred/pseuds/Kayndred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(It's the part of his mind that monitors his Adderall that is neat, tidy, so organized it's obsessive. It's this part of his brain that will never, ever forget.)</p><p> </p><p>He's always been stubborn.</p><p> </p><p>He won't give them that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is how an angel dies

**Author's Note:**

> loss - n.:  
> 4\. the state of being deprived of or of being without something that one has had: the loss of old friends.  
> possession - n.:  
> 2\. anything that is owned or possessed
> 
> Here we go!

Maybe the worst part about Stiles' ADD is that without it, without the Adderall, he'd have an eidetic memory - perfect pathways to mental file-boxes full of information on everything he's read. Pictures, videos, articles, book pages, everything as neat and organized as a CIA database. 

Instead, he's got meandering walks through interconnected clumps of knowledge like a tangle of yarn. It's not that he doesn't have the know-how - it's there, definitely, he can give the entire history of male circumcision for Chrissakes - it's just... everywhere. 

(It's the part of his mind that monitors his Adderall that is neat, tidy, so organized it's obsessive. It's this part of his brain that will never, _ever_ forget.)

Maybe the best part about Stiles' ADD is that without it, everything would be a whole lot worse.

**ii. _so Eden sank to grief_**

The walk from the car can't be more than a few minutes long - maybe five, maybe eight - but to Stiles it feels like forever, the back and forth motion of the box while his captors walk, the unshifting light, the only sounds being the crunching of gravel beneath feet and the grunts of exertion from both the man and the woman.

He can tell when they move from being outside to inside because the foot steps change, and there's more of them. The gravel sound gives way to the scuff of shoe-souls against tile, and the two foot steps multiplying into many. He can't keep track of them all. 

While the foot noise increases to a low wash of thunder against his ears, the swaying and the stress-noise continue - no one speaks, and time feels liquid and crawling against his skin. He wants to scream, to shout, to cry, but the need to know and catalog everything ( _every sound, every movement,_ everything) keeps him stilled. Quiet. Waiting. 

The stop is abrupt - one moment movement, the next the a sliding hiss and a catch, the metal box no longer swaying. He isn't on the ground, there was no disturbance or rotational swinging to make it even feel like they lowered him to the floor, and he doesn't have any more time to think about it because the top of the box is opening and a big hand is grabbing him by the back of the neck and pulling him out and dropping him none to gently onto the floor. His head spins and his eyes fight to adjust to the light (because holy fuck is there _light_ , everything is blinding and white and _hurting_ ), and he can vaguely register people walking away, footsteps receding, and a door closing.

But he isn't alone. 

In the several heartbeats it takes for his his mind to snap back into focus like a shifting camera lens, he picks up the sound of pens _skritch-scratching_ on paper, fabric moving against fabric, tapping. When his vision finally clears he wants to laugh and cry all at once. 

It's so much worse and so much more surreal than he thought it was going to be.

He's lying on the floor in a room that looks like something out of a hospital, white on white and sterilized. The floor tiles are cold against the back of his head, also white and unnaturally clean. Around him are men and women in - of all things - lab coats and scrubs. They're clad in blue and white with pens in their pockets like it's some kind of fad. The surreal creepiness only racks up higher because their faces are covered by thick reflective glasses and breathing masks (and the cold grip of _oh shit oh my god oh somebody please save me_ just tightens around his spine, makes his lungs ache and his mind blank out because _this is it_. This is all those stories he's heard about and seen on the news about girls getting trapped in the cellars of insane people for years, of boys being stolen from their homes and kept in bunkers in the forest. This is it. Not with a whimper or a bang but a carton of eggs in the backseat, there and then _gone_ ).

He's taken psychology, he knows what this is - Dr. Zimbardo's school jail and roles versus mentality had taken up two weeks of class time and worksheets. These are the guards (sun glasses, uniforms, unity, _we the law_ ), he thinks, trying to curl in on himself. These are the guards and jailors and the dictators, oh my, and for once Stiles doesn't think that he can get out of this. He knows, in his very bones, that he can't. 

They don't move as one, but they do move. Half of the group tucks their clip-boards under their arms and waits, while the other half moves forward and picks him up off the floor - three people to carry, three to watch, he thinks as they move him to a different side of the room. He's put on a table and bands are pulled across his shoulders and his waist. They cut the duct tape from around his wrists and ankles, and then his legs and arms are restrained too. 

His voice is working now, at least.

"Hey, hey, you really don't want to do this." They tighten the straps on his arms. "No I'm serious, my dad's the sheriff, he probably already has the force looking for me and this is like, the _worst_ idea you guys have ever had." The fear is so thick in his mouth that he can't tell if he's saying anything coherent, just that his voice is there in the silence. "I mean, you've obviously got a serious operation going on and that's rad, really, but I'm like important and shit and - _oh my god what is that_." Out of the corner of his eye he can see it - one of the doctors, they have to be doctors, tapping a syringe full of a clear liquid, releasing the air. The faceless person moves forward, and even though he's strapped down, like, really thoroughly, he still struggles, arches up and wiggles in the opposite direction and jerks his arm. The only thing it does is prompt the other faceless doctor people into holding him down manually, hands on his shoulders, below his knees, his arms. 

"No, no, no this is - no what, no, please, _please_." His voice is high and aching, pulling out of him like hooks, but the doctor doesn't stop, just steps forward and slides the needle into his arm. He doesn't even realize he's begging. One of the doctors covers his mouth with their hand (the doctor is a man with broad hands). 

There's several heart beats that pass, full of sterile silence and keening noises that crawl from Stiles' throat. He counts one breath, three, before his body feels like it's too light to stay on the table, before his joints feel thick and fuzzy. The hand moves away and his head lolls to the side, tongue thick in his mouth, vision swimming slightly but still focused. Cotton fills his ears and the sounds - what little there were - grew muffled and far away.

That, of course, is when they started speaking. 

Voices, cold, clinical, bland even - passing information to each other while quick fingers unbound his arms and legs. 

_"Beacon Hills, California,"_ they said, _"running with werewolves."_    
 _"Totally human. Eighteen, afflicted with ADD and moderate insomnia."_

They manhandle him off the table and out the door, his body slung over one of the group's shoulders like a sack of potatoes. There are twists and turns - maybe a hundred, maybe two - and then he's being lowered onto another table, this one padded lightly and without restraints. 

_"Bonded?"_  
"Not as far as we can tell."  
"Affinity level?"  
"High. Warranting Code Red SV under duress, Code Orange SI normally. Erratic though - untapped or uncontrolled or both. No sings of regular use." 

The artificial lighting over head makes his head hurt - his can feel the muscles in his eyes pulling and contracting to balance out the sensory input, his head pounding in time with his heart. His mind slips in and out of focus quickly, but the sensations and movements are not lost to him - he can feel each shift acutely, like neon lights burning in his mind, his awareness shifting to each new thing as quickly as it comes. 

He can feel it as each layer of clothing is pealed away, the tug of his socks on his feet and the catch of his jacket on his arms. From the corner of his eye he can see them folded neatly on a nearby table, each item it's own pile. Panic spikes through him when he feels his jeans unbuttoned, the zipper sliding down smoothly, a single stroke of separating teeth. He can feel the sweat beading on his brow as his pants are tugged down, the denim catching on the lines of his hips and the curves of his knees, then again on his ankles when the waist band passes over his feet. It's clinical, calculated, quick - latex drags over skin, removing fabric, stripping him away. He can see the hands move forward, fingers looping under the elastic of his underwear, sliding them off in one smooth motion. 

The table is cold and soft and far away, but it doesn't matter, because Stiles is naked and disconnected and terrified. His tongue works against his teeth, too thick and dry, set wrong in his mouth, eyes wide as nondescript hands run over his body, checking, poking prodding. He can tell when they find the phone tracker, a distant tug alerting him to the separation of tape from skin.

It hits him like a kick to the chest - he's lost to the world, gone, everything he came with pulled off and taken away. He has nothing left, and only the slimmest of hopes that maybe, maybe, someone knows he's gone. 

For all intents and purposes, Stiles Stilinski has vanished from the face of the earth - and the only people who care to look have spent the last two weeks running through the woods, spending barely more than a couple hours at the house, total.

He's screwed.

The clean slide of the plastic gloves on his skin brings him back, to the sterile glare of the walls and the sharp-quick fingers of the faceless doctors that surround him. There are so many hands, so many people, voices smoothing and humming over his ears, across his eyes, like living things. Stiles feels his skin twitch in an aborted shiver, and tastes fear. 

_"We have a room?"_  
"At the end of Hall C. Room sixteen vacated last week."  
"We'll put him there until - if - the procedure takes."  
"It's been scheduled?"  
"For the next month, at least." 

His vision swings, upward, right side vertical, and hard hands swing his arms over stiff shoulders, his toes dragging on the ground when they begin to move him away from the slab. His cheek rolls against his shoulder and then back, a slash of color catching his eye as the staff move him again.

Fire. 

A metal slide in the wall, lifted up and away, the living hands of fire curling behind it. Reaching, grasping, he watches them consume first the needle - slide down, _snap pop_ , gone - and then a lump of fabric.

His shirt. 

First one, then the other - black cotton-poly blend and then plaid, turned to crisping ashes and smoke in a matter of seconds (how hot and thrilling that fire must be, how terrifying, how _alive_ \- Stiles would give his left arm to know how it feels against his skin, because _anything_ is better than the nameless fate that awaits him). 

Then his pants, double folded, right in, a his and snap against the metal and - gone. His socks are barely even a blink, a sigh, and then the cover slips back down, and the fire is gone.

Stiles is gone. 

The path they take him down is full of a hundred twists and turns, and this time it probably is, even though his mind still feels like it's full of cotton and paper, his joints nitrogen against the liquid glass of his bones. He doesn't feel the need to fight anymore, not with hopelessness so prevalent in everything that's happened - abduction, being injected with something like anesthesia but not, loosing his cloths. He's being dragged naked down a hall, arms slung over two people who probably plan on killing him. This is so much more and so much less than Gerard, than anything he's ever faced - there had always been a chance, a silver lining, a last ditch idea to save the day.

Now he can barely think, can only breath as they open a door and pull him through, closing it with an echoing _snick_ behind him. It feels like anticipation, like thick smoke, like looking at the edge of the cliff and knowing it's the only escape.

Stiles will wait for the other shoe to drop, because then - _then_ he will know that he's done. He's always been stubborn. 

His head is at the perfect angle to watch them clasp shining manacles around his wrists without even a snap, before they shove his head forward so he can feel his chin against his chest. From there he gets to watch his ankles get locked in, gets to see his toes lift off the ground as the chain supporting his wrists is tightened until he's strung, bow string taught, between the ceiling and the floor. A spasm wracks his shoulders, thick and painful against the fog in his mind, the muscles protesting loudly all along his back, across his hips and down. Tears rise in his eyes, but he snaps his eyes shut and wills them away, breathing tight through his nose.

The water that hits him in the back feels like a thousand fishhooks raking across his skin - a scream tears it's way out of his throat, long and high and sharp, and he holds it until his throat feels raw and open from the sound. The pressure doesn't abate. 

With slow determination the spray rotates around him, blasting his skin with water so cold it burns, moving steadily up and down and back up, leaving blue tinged swaths of flesh in its wake. It beats across his scalp and over his face, eyes pressed so tightly shut that spots dance and spin the blackness.

The temperature change is abrupt and scalding, from a cold-burn to a bleeding scald, and he screams again and again and again, until the only noise he can make is broken whimpering and guttural keening sounds. The heat is balm and sickness all in one, returning warmth to him and bringing him higher, farther from his pain threshold than the ice water. 

It goes on forever, for thousands of years, until his heartbeat is the only noise from himself that he can hear, until the water feels a constant against his skin. 

And then it's gone. 

His muscles spasm and tighten at the shock, his mind, only moderately clearer, reeling from the absence. He barely has time to notice that there are deft hands removing the metal bands from his wrists and ankles before he is being moved, eyes rolling wildly in their sockets, trying to focus. The clarity of his mind is coming back, quicker now, and even though several sets of turns have been lost to him he can feel it - the need to know, to have direction, just in case. If there's a chance of - ... just in case.

Sitting down in an actual chair after so much manual movement is a welcome respite and a slap to his consciousness, and for the several heartbeats he has to himself Stiles can't help but think, ' _this is probably the lamest little mercy ever to be appreciated. What would anyone say._ ' Then his head is being jerked around, and he can focus on the mirror in front of him - when did the mirror get there? - on the man behind him, clad like all the rest, brandishing an electric shaver, already alive and buzzing. 

He jerks his head around, trying to fight the inevitable, but the man just grabs one side of his head and brings the blades to the other, and with a quick sliding motion Stiles' hair is being shorn clean off. He'd never gotten it very long (it was impractical, what with the running through the forests and the kidnapping and the fighting. Everyone Packside kept their hair short now, and even Erica, Lydia and Allison had taken to wearing their hair up and out of the way almost constantly. Even if he couldn't shift, Stiles had followed the werewolf trend and kept it just short of two inches), but watching it fall in thin drifts against his shoulders was like watching his clothing being burnt.

Another piece of Stiles Stilinski, just Stiles, gone.

When there's only a  very fine peach fuzz left, the man stops, electric razor clicking into silence. A hairdryer is brandished at him, almost on full, and he twitches against the burn of hot air over his sensitive skin, even as his hair falls away from him and onto the floor. Lost, gone.

He watches as smooth feeling, scentless liquid is poured onto his head, stinging slightly against his freshly exposed scalp. The ooze is spread, down his neck and shoulders, under his jaw, across his cheek bones. More is applied, dripped and rubbed down his back and arms, over his stomach, along his ass and thighs - clinical, cold, and for a moment he imagines that this is almost as bad as rape, and then hates himself for it as gloved hands move over his legs and feet, squishing the liquid between his toes, around each of his fingers.

Scentless - another inch, vanished.

They tug him away from the chair, toward a different part of the room he hadn't been able to see from the mirror's reflection - cabinets, a handful of them, the same white with light blue accenting as the doctors, as the halls, as the rest of the rooms he's cared to notice. One doctor holds him, grip firm and plastic against his skin, while another opens the doors, revealing dozens and dozens of pairs of grey shirts, pants, underwear. 

Bland, colorless, lifeless - more and more, gone gone gone.

The tall doctor who'd been rooting through the clothing jerks a shirt over his head, around his ears, forcing his arms through the arm holes. Stiles' head is screwed on right enough again to glare murderously at him, to wince when the pain happens, rather than belatedly, but his tongue still feels heavy and brick-like in his mouth. He rolls it against his teeth, waiting for the time when he can snap and snarl and tell them off.

The underwear and pants are slid on with an equal amount of distaste, and he realizes there's no draw string, no buttons, no clasps on anything. Nothing to use as means of escape, or a weapon, or a last resort. Nothing - handicapped and tool-less, left in grey.

They steer him out of the shaving room and down several more halls, his eyes darting up to see the bold navy of blocky letters at the corners. A, an empty hall lined with doors and sourceless lighting; B, a hall full of doors and empty lighting, an orderly at the end, exiting a room; C, perpetually bright and remote, cold, still, they turn down this hall, several dozen steps, to C16, and the doctor to his right swings the door open with the slide of a key-card and a thumb print.

A show of power, of futility in escape, of cunning and planning and security. 

He's shoved in roughly, but not violently, and doesn't have a chance to stumble or even turn before the door is closing, locking with an oppressive beeping. One, two, three - silence.

The room is off white, windowless, full of the same baseless light as the halls - there's a sliding slot on his door at eye level, and larger door at the bottom, hopefully for food. A slab juts from the wall at roughly knee height, padded with a thin pallet and an only slightly thicker pillow. A blanket rests on the foot of his new bed, a button push toilet in the opposite corner.

Tired, hurting, gripped by fear so great he's gone numb, dead, cold with it, Stiles sits on the bed and curls in upon himself, knees drawn up tight against his chest. It's then that he sees it.

The number.

Dark grey against the light grey of his shirt sleeve, _C0016-SVSIT_ stands stark and ugly in the permanent light.

Now, even his name is gone.

Stiles - C0016-SVSIT - presses his forehead against his knees and doesn't cry.

He won't give them that. 

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to let you guys know that there are a couple endgames I have in mind for this series, and they all work together, so let me tell you:  
> 1\. Sterek is endgame of all endgames. I. Will. Get there!  
> 2\. I know exactly how Stiles is going to end up - I know what happens in 'this place', I know who he meets and doesn't meet, etc.  
> 3\. There are some very specific stepping stones I have to get to before other things can happen. Some of them aren't too big, or to obvious for anyone not me, but I'll point them out when we get there (for those of you who want to know, our first Stepping Stone has been reached. Figure out what it is?)
> 
> The first installment got a lot of hits and for that I'm really thankful. You guys are awesome, even if you don't leave kudos or comments or anything. So thanks, and I hope you stick it out with me :]
> 
> If you have questions, feel free to ask, I'll answer them as best I can without giving too much away :D


End file.
